


The Laird in the Water

by jellybeanforest



Series: Creature Comforts: A Stony Anthology [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale Creatures, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Brief Mentions of Late Medieval Punishments for Homosexuality, Cannibalism, Cap-Ironman Bingo, Children talking to Strangers, Dark Fairy Tale, Dark Tony Stark, Darkfic, Disemboweling, Dismemberment, Homophobia, Horror, Internalized Homophobia, Kelpie Tony Stark, Kelpies, Light Smut, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Slash, Rated for dark themes, Scottish Steve Rogers, Sort Of, don't do this at home, stranger danger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:07:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22282354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jellybeanforest/pseuds/jellybeanforest
Summary: In 14th century Scotland, Steve is a child with an imaginary friend that lives in a nearby river, the site of many drownings and horrific discoveries. His Nan claims it to be the work of a kelpie. Steve doesn’t believe her of course. Kelpies are a myth, old wives tales to keep children from playing near swiftly-moving streams and young women from entertaining the company of handsome strangers. However, as he grows, Steve realizes that the young man in the water may not be quite as imaginary nor as innocuous as he once believed.For the Cap-IronMan Bingo 2019 Round 2 – AU: Fairy Tale Creatures.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Series: Creature Comforts: A Stony Anthology [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2041672
Comments: 82
Kudos: 213
Collections: Captain America/Iron Man Bingo





	1. Something Wicked This Way Comes

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during the wars of Scottish Independence in the first half of the 14th century. Childhood in Northern Europe (including Scotland) in Medieval times was very different than it is today. Parents of all social classes often sent their children as young as 7 (but usually by age 14) to be servants/apprentices in other people’s homes for a period of about 7-10 years. Additionally, the age people could marry was 14 for boys and 12 for girls, but most people waited until their twenties after their apprenticeship/servitude was done so they can have the money to start a household. Steve (short for Stiobhan, which is the Scottish form of Steven) is a member of a class of free tenants, which is a working lower class (serfdom had died out by the 14th century). He has a lord he is beholden to (as a member of the lord’s clan in a feudal system). As an adult, he is expected to take up arms for his lord, supply oxen, grind grain in their mills. 
> 
> Sith (pronounced shee) is the Scottish word for faeries, and encompasses a lot of the supernatural. Kelpies are Scottish shape-shifting water horses with a taste for human flesh that live near bodies of water. They are said to lure humans to their deaths, drowning and devouring their victims, leaving only entrails or livers (and occasionally hearts) on the banks to be discovered. A typical story is a group of children climb onto a kelpie’s back (in horse form) while a boy tries to pet it and his hand gets stuck. He has to amputate his hand/fingers to be free of the kelpie, thereby surviving while the other children stuck to its back are drowned and devoured. Alternatively, the kelpie can take human form (typically male in older versions of the tale, sometimes a handsome youth or a grisly old man). Its human form may have water weeds in its hair or hooves facing backwards in lieu of feet. The stories were probably cautionary tales about rivers and strangers, and Steve is lucky the kelpie decided not to eat him, so um… don’t try this at home, kids!
> 
> This fic is rated M for graphic violence, not smut. Tony does have the appearance of a man in his twenties throughout the entire fic while Steve ages from 10ish to 24. Steve has a crush on him in his younger years, but Tony sees him as more of a pet human, like a puppy. It doesn’t really turn romantic until after Steve returns from his life-cycle servitude in his twenties.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stevie meets a laird down on his luck, but not all is as it appears.

His Ma had told Stevie never to talk to strangers, and they didn’t come any stranger than the man standing knee-deep in the river. His neatly-trimmed facial hair and long, pitch-black hair (though damp and tangled with river weeds) speaks to his high station as did the fine linen undertunic and braes he dons. Curiously, though his underclothes are soaked through and nearly transparent, violating social norms of modesty, the man displays no shame, choosing to stand so high up the bank for all the world to witness his reduced circumstances. Highwaymen must have beset him on the dirt path to the village, stealing his horse and clothing, though strangely leaving the prominent silver necklace encircling his neck, before tossing him into the river for the fish. Perhaps he had even hit his head on the way down then rolled along the river currents and become confused, or so Stevie presumes.

So, against the advice of his Ma as well as his own better judgment, Stevie calls out to the man, “Good day to you, sir. Can I give you a hand?”

The stranger simply stares back at him, his eyes wide and dark. Had the child been older, he may have found the emptiness there unnerving. “I say can I be helping you at all, then? You seem in a bad way.”

Stevie drops the bundle of firewood he had been collecting to walk to the edge of the bank, his bare feet avoiding the pebbled shore to crouch down on a large smooth stone at the water’s edge, but when the man draws no closer, Stevie reaches under the hem of his loose tunic to fumble with the purse at his belt, pulling out a wool-cloth packet and untying the twine to reveal an oat cake. It is supposed to be his meal if he didn’t make it back home in time for supper, but he supposes the stranger needs it more than he.

He holds it out to the man. “Are you hungry?” 

The man nods, taking a couple steps forward, haltingly, towards Stevie, lifting an outstretched arm. His nails, wet from the river, gleam in the afternoon sun. They are long and fine like blunted talons, and his hands smooth, absent the calluses and chipped, bitten-off nails of the free tenants with whom Stevie normally associates. His hand darts out quick as a snake and snaps up the oat cake, startling Stevie who reflexively relinquishes the whole of it and falls backward onto his bony bum. The man draws it up to his mouth, tearing into the cake with ravenous speed as it falls to pieces in his hand and crumbs drop from his chin to his chest.

“You must be starving,” the boy notes as he crosses his skinny legs into a seated position. His nan would rap his knuckles if he displayed such poor manners at the communal table. “You should get out of the wet. It’s cold, and the river has got more than one man this season past.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, lad,” the stranger tells him, though muffled through his voracity.

_Ah, so he speaks!_

“My name’s Stiobhan, but most call me Stevie. What do they call you?”

The man mumbles something unintelligible, and Stevie begins to wonder whether he be a simpleton after all, but not wanting to be rude, he nudges, “Excuse me? I didn’t catch that.”

The man swallows, clears his throat, and tries again, but what emerges is like no dialect Stevie has ever heard. It sounds of running water like that of a babbling brook splashing over rocks. He listens for the consonants, trying to clarify it in his mind, to have it make sense as a given name.

“Tolmie?” Stevie tries.

The man speaks yet again.

Stevie listens carefully. “Tony?”

The attempt must be close enough because ‘Tony’ pauses then nods his assent, unwilling to make a fourth attempt.

“Glad to meet you, Tony,” Stevie says brightly.

Tony smiles wide, showing off too many teeth.

* * *

Steve returns late for supper, but Ma seats him anyway after a gentle rebuke. _You are much too skinny to miss meals,_ she tells him as he slides in next to his younger (but more hale and hearty) brother Douglass. Supper is a thick slice of oat bread and a bowl of pottage stew with beans, peas, and onions supplemented with a bit of fish, though all the meat was picked clean from the communal pot before Stevie could arrive.

“Why were you late today, Stevie? Get lost in the woods then?” Nan inquires.

“I met a laird on the road. He fell into the river and was right confused,” Stevie replies, soaking his bread in the remains of his stew to get the very last drop. They had not the money to waste anything, not since his father had passed a couple winters past.

“Just say you were late chasing a squirrel into the underbrush. No need to lie, Stevie,” Douglass grumbles. “Ow!” he exclaims when Stevie socks him on the arm, leading to a short-lived scuffle.

“No fighting at the table,” Ma orders sharply just as Duggie gets a last punch in.

Stevie rubs his arm. “He called me a liar, he did,” he complains, a bit put out that his brother had had the last strike. Perhaps he’ll deliver an extra kick to his shins later when Ma puts them to bed, but that sort of physical altercation invariably ended with his younger brother the victor, having twisted Stevie’s arm behind his back and his face into the straw mattress until he was forced to concede defeat. It was humiliating losing to someone two years his junior, but Stevie never seemed to learn, his temper flaring often in response to some slight or other.

“I didn’t know our laird was out traveling today,” Nan ruminates.

“Not _our_ laird,” Stevie clarifies. “A laird. He said his name is Tony. Outlaws must have taken his horse and clothes as he was left bare in his undertunic. Lucky they didn’t take those as well.” Linen underclothes were prized possessions after all, occasionally being bequeathed secondhand from laird to servant in the event of the former’s death. “I gave him my oat cake and pointed out the way to town. I hope he made it back alright.” Stevie would have led him to an inn himself, but he was due to return home, and Tony had waved off the boy’s reservations, claiming he could manage the journey alone.

“You best be careful, Stevie,” Nan advises, looking concerned. “You could have run afoul of an asrai or even a kelpie. If it be a kelpie, you are lucky to have escaped with your life.”

“Ma, not again with the kelpies please,” Ma pleads before admonishing her eldest son. “But Stevie, you should be wary of strangers. The monsters we must fear are dodgy men, not the sith of our imagination.”

Nan looks to her daughter, her eyes rheumy but sharp. “Kelpies be real, child,” she contends. “When I was a wee lass not too much older than Stevie, a lass from the village – Aileana – her older brother Brodric got taken by a kelpie. A beautiful black stallion it was. Him and eight other children climbed on its back thinking it a mere horse, and they were all pulled into the loch, drowned and eaten. Only the liver of one child and the entrails of a second were ever found. Washed up on the shore they were. Wee Caillen had seen it all. Tried to pet the kelpie upon its snout and got stuck, they say. Had to cut off his own hand to get away, but least he survived until the pox got him a decade after.”

“I never liked that story. So gruesome it be. Those children prob’ly got caught in the swell after a rain, washed away to their deaths, the poor things,” Ma says, as she collects the bowls for the wash-up. “Stevie, come and help your Ma with the dishes.”

But when Stevie passes Nan, she grasps his shoulder. “You be careful of strangers in the water, Stevie. Kelpies, they stick to rivers and lochs, but they can stay above water for a spell to catch their prey. And once they got you, you can’t be unstuck without their say-so.”

“Ma, stop scaring the boy.”

“Sarah, I tell you we have a kelpie nearby,” she insists. “Alasdair found a horse near the river, silver bridle and all, and harnessed it to his cart alongside his old gelding, Eachann. It went wild, driving the whole lot into the river. He lost Eachann in the process, the only thing found after were entrails.”

“Old man Alasdair tried to claim a horse he knew nothing about, and it spooked,” Ma points out patiently. “Horses are always startling affright when all there be is wind and shadows.”

But Nan is adamant. “It was a kelpie. A demon horse from the depths of the loch, mane and hide black as pitch, hooves faced backwards, and a mouth, wider than it ought have any reason to be, split ear to ear, with rows of sharp teeth to rip your flesh from your bones.”

“Tony is no horse,” Stevie interjects. He looks nothing like the creature his Nan is describing.

“Ah, but a kelpie can change its shape to suit the victim,” Nan says. “The kelpie be a liar, Stevie, and it will do anything to snare you or I to feed its bloodlust.”

“Ma, the boys do not need more fuel for night terrors.”

Nan releases him, and Stevie scurries away after his Ma to help her with the dishes and sweeping up, but he can’t help but think of the fearsome shape-shifter and whether the man he had met in the river had been one of their number.

* * *

When Stevie sees Tony again, the latter is wearing black silks with his silver necklace overlaid on a dark-red brocade hood. There’s hose in a matching maroon over his legs and terminating in boots covering his feet. He stands, perched atop a bridge overlooking the self-same river where Stevie had first met him.

“Hail lad!” he calls out before Stevie can duck away.

“Good day to you, sir,” Stevie greets him. While needing to cross the bridge, he comes no closer to the laird, observing his feet from a distance and trying to decide whether they are vaguely hoof-shaped within his boots.

“Come closer, Stevie. I have a gift for you, as a thank you for your assistance from before,” Tony says amiably, reaching for something in the bucket by his feet.

But Stevie doesn’t comply with the laird’s request. Instead, he shouts, “My nan… she told me you might be a monster known as a kelpie.”

Tony pauses at that, his smile turning a touch wooden. “And what does a kelpie look like, pray tell?”

“A demon horse, with hide and hair black as pitch and backward hooves and big, sharp teeth made to eat any that cross its path.”

“And do I look like such a beast?” Tony inquires.

_That’s the rub of it, isn’t it?_

Stevie shifts his stance from one foot to the other, the hem of his undyed beige wool tunic tickling the back of his calves. He reaches down to itch nervously, not taking his eyes off the man. “Kelpie can change shape, sir. Can take on the form of a man, she says.”

Tony tilts his head to the side, his face screwed up in thought. “That’s quite the conundrum, because if that is the way of it, you can never know if any person you meet is or is not one of these monsters. After all, a kelpie would surely never admit to being such,” he posits.

Steve considers it, disturbed to find the words ring true. Anybody at all could be the beast, if he can take any form he desires to ensnare his prey. “…Would you eat me then, if a kelpie you be?” he hedges.

Tony chuckles. “No, I do not think I would, Stevie, even if I were this demon of which you speak.”

“Okay…” but the boy is still suspicious.

“Might I suggest an alternative arrangement, seeing as how you cannot trust me and there is no way to prove my intentions one way or the other to your satisfaction, I’m afraid. So I will leave this bucket where it sits, and you come collect your reward when I’m gone,” and with a flourish, Tony exits the bridge in the opposite direction, heading down the path to a destination unknown.

Stevie approaches the bucket, slowing as he reaches the top of the bridge to peer inside, finding the fresh spotted body of a large river trout glistening in the sunlight.

* * *

The next time Stevie meets Tony, the man is skipping flat stones downriver, watching them bounce four-five-six times before they plop below the surface.

“Good morning, sir,” Stevie greets him from the road before drawing closer, gingerly stepping around hard pebbles with bare feet. “I wanted to thank you for the fish.” His Ma had wondered where he had come upon such a find, to which Stevie had explained the laird’s kindness. She had been wary of the gift but couldn’t decline it in such lean times. Ma told Stevie he was not to associate with strangers anymore, but they had eaten well that day.

Stevie of course hadn’t made a definitive promise one way or the other, and besides, Tony is no longer a stranger (or so he reasons). Yet, he still feels he is lying to his own mother by the omission.

“You’re welcome, Stevie.”

“How do you get it to go so far?” Stevie asks, watching Tony’s latest stone travel six times before disappearing.

And so Tony shows him how to select the perfect stone and skip them downriver. Stevie fails, miserably so, with his stone failing to skip even once.

“Well, it be easier across a loch,” Tony had replied enigmatically when Stevie had complained. He eyes the boy’s scrawny limbs, hollowed cheeks, and short bristled hair, stiff and brittle like straw. “I can teach you to fish instead, if you’d be open to such a thing.”

That piques his interest. It had been something Stevie’s Da had meant to teach him and Duggie before he passed so unexpectedly.

And so Tony teaches the boy how to passively fish in the river using wicker fish traps angled towards the flow, letting the stream do most of the work. The man glides through the water almost seamlessly, while Stevie shivers, splashes, and struggles to find his footing, nearly getting swept away in the current if not for Tony’s steadying grip on his upper arm.

“If you be attempting this solo, you should use a rope tied to a stout tree on the bank to keep yourself from washing away clear to the loch,” Tony tells him.

“What if the kelpie gets us?” Stevie worries.

Tony sighs. “Right now, I’m the most dangerous thing in this river; just ask the wee fish. No kelpie is going to bring you harm, lad,” and he sounds so certain that even Stevie is inclined to believe him.

Afterwards, when they Stevie has caught a basket of fish, he emerges from the stream to re-fasten his purse to his belt and pull his tunic back over his head, straightening it over his wet underclothes. He takes out his supper to share.

“My Ma made me a special treat for supper if you’d like some,” Steve removes the twine as Tony looks on curiously. He unfolds the cloth, revealing what looks to be a slice of ground meat packed firm with a rubbery coating hugging the rim. “It’s haggis.”

Tony’s nostril twitch. “You keep it, Stevie. If it be a special favorite, I would not take it from you.”

“You sure? It’s delicious. We rarely have mutton, but offal–”

“It’s the leavings of the animal after all the best parts have been stripped.”

Steve’s temper flares. “Not all of us can be lairds,” he says before he can catch himself, but then he drops his shoulders, ashamed at his conduct after Tony had been so generous with his time as to teach him how to fish. “I’m sorry, that was unkind of me.”

“It’s alright. I shouldn’t be insulting your Ma’s cooking. I meant no offense,” Tony replies. He scoots the wicker basket towards the boy. “You best be getting on now, lad, before your fish rots.”

“Will I see you in the morrow?”

“Aye, lad. If you’re coming this way, I suppose you will.”

* * *

Stevie continues to see Tony from time to time. They fish, they talk, and over time, he slowly befriends the older man. Though he never told his Ma or Nan, Duggie knew of the unlikely friendship and often pestered Stevie to introduce him to the rich laird. However, the few times Stevie had relented, Tony had failed to show. He and his brother had sat on the banks until the air grew cold and the light began to dim.

“Does this laird truly exist, Stevie?” Duggie had inquired after the fourth time such a meeting had fallen through.

“This is where he usually be, I swear,” Stevie had said, looking up and down the river and seeing neither hide nor hair of his friend. “How else would I have known how to set a fish trap, then?”

“Maybe Fergus showed you or Old Man Fletcher in a hand-me-down tunic?”

“Fergus is no older than you or I, and I right know what Old Man Fletcher looks like,” Stevie deadpans, unimpressed with Duggie’s suggestions. “It weren’t him, I tell you.”

His brother shrugs. “I don’t know, Stevie. You sure you did not make him up?”

That had earned Duggie a punch to the shoulder, leading to yet another scuffle where Stevie is once again bested by his younger brother, who presses his face in the dirt, refusing to relent until Stevie concedes.

* * *

“Why don’t you ever show when I bring Duggie around?” Steve asks Tony when he sees him again. The man is tying a rope around a sturdy tree stump, looping it under a few notches and branches so it doesn’t slide up.

“What do you take me for, lad?” Tony states calmly, but his tone is firm and perhaps a touch miffed. “I am not a servant at your beck and call.”

His shoulders slump. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Tony. It’s just… no one believes you exist.”

“Why does that matter?” Tony hands him the other end to tie around his waist. “Now, use the knot I showed you, so you don’t tumble downstream.”

 _Perhaps Tony has a point,_ Stevie thinks as he picks through the stone bottom to check his catch. What did it matter so long as Tony was willing to teach him the skills he needed to survive, skills he could teach Duggie before Stevie was inevitably sent away?

And perhaps it was also inevitable as Stevie aged that he began to have impure thoughts about his elusive friend and benefactor, things he struggled to mention to the priest at the local parish come confession. From the look of him, Tony can’t be that old, and he is quite handsome, something Stevie comes to appreciate by the time he’s twelve. But it’s wrong, he knows, sick and deviant and Tony would be horrified if he ever knew, so Stevie buries the feelings deep and tries not to think about the water cascading down the laird’s calves when he emerges from the stream or whether his neat beard would tickle if he ever deigned to kiss Stevie’s cheek (not that he would, doesn’t mean Stevie doesn’t think about it).

For his part, Tony barely seems to notice the passage of time, until one day, he stops talking mid-sentence to cock his head to the side and stare at the boy with a calculating gaze.

“…What?” Stevie asks.

“Did you grow taller, or do those shoes come with lifts?” Tony looks to the boy’s feet now clothed in shoes of thick (but flat) leather before drawing himself up to his full height. Still, the top of Stevie’s head is nearly level with his eyes.

“I’m growing,” he confirms. “Near a man soon. By summer’s end, my Ma will loan me out to the Abernathies to earn some coin for the family.”

“Your Ma is selling you?” He sounds appalled at the notion.

But now it’s Stevie’s turn to be perplexed. “I’ll be fourteen soon. A man. It be common practice to send young men and women to serve in another’s household. My Ma has not the money for an apprenticeship in the burghs, so I’ll be in a nearby county for ten years yet,” he rubs an elbow, concentrating on digging a hole in the mud with his shoe before remembering not to do so, lest he wear out the sole. “I hope the Abernathies be kind. Some of the folk that’s gone before me say they work you hard and feed you less, not being one of their own kin,” he mumbles, looking up to meet Tony’s eye. “What was it like for you? You must have been sent off to serve another laird, to learn how to manage lands and finances.”

“I did not have the same training,” Tony admits. “It is not a common custom among my people.”

Stevie’s brow knits together. “But everyone does it: Rich and poor, everyone. How else would you learn?”

But Tony disregards the question altogether in favor of one he must deem more important. “Do you want to go?”

Of course he doesn’t. No one wants to leave home to travel several miles away to live with strangers in a strange town with no one to love them.

“I do wonder how I will take to being in another’s home,” Steve admits. “But mostly… I– well, I worry. I don’t want to impose, and I know you don’t like going into town, but could you… maybe check in on my family from time to time? They’ll have one less mouth to feed, but winter’s always been rough, more so ever since my Da passed… and… I’m sorry. You don’t have to, but…”

“They’ll be fine, lad. I’ll make sure of it best I am able,” Tony promises, squeezing the thin blade of the boy’s shoulder. “Would you like to see my home? It be stranger than where you are headed, I’m sure.”

Stevie perks up. “Alright.”

In the years they had known each other, Stevie had never been to Tony’s home nor he to his. He wonders what it is like. How many rooms and whether there are multiple floors? Is there a drawbridge to enter the keep and will there be a walkway around the circumference of the walls to see out at all sides?

Tony pulls a wine skin from under his cape, handing it to the boy. “We’ll be taking the river then. Hold this to your lips and use it to breathe when you run low on air.”

“Come again?” Stevie can’t possibly have heard him right. Wouldn’t it be easier to take a boat or raft downstream? Tony can’t possibly be serious about having to _swim_ to his home.

“The bag may never inflate, but neither will it run out of air. It is a gift from me to you.”

_He’s serious._

“Do you trust me, Stevie?” he asks one last time.

“…Yes,” and so when Tony enters the stream, Stevie follows right after him, shivering in the cold.

Tony takes hold of his wrist. “Take a deep breath. It won’t be cold long,” and then he dunks under the water pulling the boy after him.

True to his word, once submerged, Stevie finds the cold does recede. Tony doesn’t relinquish his grip on him as they whip along the currents heading downstream. And when Stevie (quickly) runs out of air, he uses the wine skin to breathe. He finds that Tony is correct; no matter how much he breathes in and out, there is always more to be had. Tony himself never comes up for air. He swims along like a grey seal, navigating the river with practiced ease, his legs more powerful than Stevie had presumed from the look of him. They spill out into a larger body of water, the depths becoming murkier the further down they swim. Schools of fish dart away from Tony and Stevie as they pass, flashing silver as the lot turn in unison to avoid them. They swim even further still before Steve sees it: along the bottom, partially obscured by the water weeds gently caressing Steve’s face, is what looks to be a home carved into the floor, a rounded top lit up with an unearthly glow from within.

Tony is pulling him towards the light, towards his home, when something clicks inside Stevie, snapping him out of his trancelike state. He tries to pull away. He even feels Tony’s grip loosen, but still he can’t escape. He’s stuck as surely as if Tony’s hand is mortared to Stevie’s flesh by cement.

He’s caught and sealed, at the mercy of a creature that is no longer a man and perhaps never _was_.

Stevie can’t breathe, the bubbles escape his throat as he tries to scream and instead feels the rush of water down his throat, through his nose. The opening of the wine skin is pressed into his mouth as Tony pulls him up, away from his abode and towards the shimmering surface of the water, and when Stevie breaks the surface, water violently expelled from his nose and mouth as he coughs, he turns this way and that, his limbs twisting about to tread water, but he finds himself alone in the middle of a loch with Tony nowhere to be found.

He swims back towards shore, the gentle waves seemingly carrying him forward toward his destination until he flops up on the rocky banks, utterly exhausted and half-crazed, the wine skin still slung by a leather strap across his body. There must be a logical explanation. Perhaps he had been swept away by the river which dumped him into the loch it feeds. As he tumbled through the water, half-drowned and delirious, he must have imagined the entire fantastical turn of events. Yes, that must be it.

But Stevie feels a crawling sensation tickling the back of his neck, a shivering twitch with all the heaviness of dread. Slowly, he turns back towards the loch to find a pair of familiar dark eyes watching him from under a curtain of water weeds, the lower half of Tony’s face bobbing just below the surface.

Stevie stumbles to his feet, running headlong from the loch into the trees, straight through until he hits a familiar road. He slows to a jog, but doesn’t stop until he’s within sight of his neighbor’s home.

For the rest of the summer, he doesn’t return to the river, nor does he approach any body of water, finding the lot of them suspect. A near-drowning had given him a fright, his mother would say, so often that Stevie had come to believe it true. He had nearly drowned and simply saw some things that weren’t there as a result. Even if he had been seeing them for years, perhaps it had all been a child’s imagination that had become warped in his near-death experience. Tony couldn’t possibly be real – after all, no one besides Stevie had ever seen the laird in the water – so Stevie had to have been making it up, this handsome stranger that had been both a fatherly salve in the early days after his Da’s death and later an unspeakable crush he must suppress. His imagination had simply run away from him.

Nothing more, nothing less.

And so, on the day he is meant to leave, Stevie packs up his meager possessions, kisses his Ma and Nan goodbye, gives Duggie a proper hug, and finally loads up himself and his belongings into a cart to be delivered to the Abernathy homestead a couple counties over.

Stevie is a man now, and as such, it is high time he put aside childish things.

 _Especially_ imaginary friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haggis is made of sheep or calf offal (heart, liver, lungs) stuffed in the animal’s stomach. As these are the parts that kelpies traditionally don’t eat, Kelpie!Tony is still not a fan, but he appreciates the thought.


	2. You Can Never Go Home Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve returns to find his family dead or gone and his home in shambles. The neighbors claim the land is cursed, but he takes possession of the ruins, vowing to make it livable by the time his brother returns from his servitude.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I split the last chapter into two because it was getting a touch long. 
> 
> Be aware I am remixing a couple kelpie stories here. Kelpies do interact with humans (outside of eating them) in Scottish folklore. In one story, a lonely kelpie transforms into a handsome young man to woo a human woman. She removes his silver necklace, turning him into a horse, which she takes to her father’s farm to put it to work for a year. She consults a wise man who tells her to return his silver necklace, which turns him back to his human form. The wise man asks the kelpie if he would choose to stay a kelpie or become mortal. The kelpie asks the woman if she would become his wife if he chose to become human, and she says yes. So, he agrees to become mortal for her. In another story, the Laird of Morphie captures a kelpie in horse form and uses it to transport heavy mill stones. When he releases the kelpie, it curses him, and as a result, his entire family dies. 
> 
> Also, I have added additional tags (Homophobia, Internalized homophobia, and brief mentions of late Medieval punishment for homosexuality). Homosexuality and same-sex unions did occur in early Medieval society (with the earliest noted case being in 1061) but became increasingly outlawed as Christianity gained prominence with harsh punishments for sodomy. Although same sex unions still occurred in some areas (called afferement or brotherhood) where two unrelated men agreed to share assets and live together, it was largely very illegal in many places by the late Medieval period. So essentially, Steve is gay during a time in late Medieval Europe when acting on homosexuality (sodomy) is punishable by castration, dismemberment or death. Nothing happens to Steve, but it’s something he is acutely aware of and thinks about from time to time.

**Ten Years Later**

Steve stands outside his family home, his bindle – containing his second set of clothing (his Sunday Best) and a bowl, cup, and spoon – dropped to his feet. The house is in shambles, the roof fallen in from disuse with the original master’s timbers having long been scavenged and repurposed for other uses. The turf and clay filling the walls had deteriorated, exposing the stone framework long enough for it to be overgrown with weedy ivies and moss. He snatches his bindle, running towards the front door, which stands open, revealing the inside to be similarly stripped of anything of worth or purpose. Gone is the table his father had constructed alongside the straw mattress they had lain upon as a family as well as the cauldron they had used to cook their stews over the hearth, which had been knocked down as well by weather, animal or scoundrel, he is uncertain. What is certain is that no one has lived here for a long while, and Steve worries after the fate of his family: Nan, Ma, and Duggie (though Duggie is likely still two years shy of completing his servitude).

He must know what happened to them, so he sets off down the road to his nearest neighbor, coming up to the woman of the house as she sits outside, sewing a new shift for her youngest babe.

“Good day to you, sir,” she calls out when Steve approaches. “My husband is out, but my father is inside if you be wanting something,” she says with a touch of suspicion.

He tilts his head, regarding the woman. She’s around his age, perhaps a couple years older, so that must mean… “That you, Sheena? Why, you’ve grown to be a bonnie lass, haven’t you?”

“How do you know my name, stranger?”

“It’s me. Stevie. From down the lane,” Steve tells her. “Your Da used to help my Ma render our walls with clay to keep out the rain after my own Da passed.”

And now it’s her turn to examine Steve more closely, the contours of the face she had once known so well now matured and sharpened into that of a man.

“Well, I’ll be. I barely recognized you, Stevie. You–” she stands, measuring his height relative to hers. “You’ve grown. I never thought you’d be so… tall.”

He’d filled out, too. Outgrown the awkward gawkiness and asthma of his youth to become broad and strong, and it helped that the rest of his face had finally caught up to his nose. His Nan had always pinched his cheeks as a boy, telling Stevie he would grow into his looks one day, just like his Gran-Da. He had thought that was all talk, something Nans were required to tell their uglier grandsons, but if the second looks he now drew meant anything, it was that she had been right. Nature had been kind to wee Stevie, and he had grown up handsome.

“The North be agreeing with you, then?” Sheena titters, her unease having melted away now that she recognized him as her childhood friend. “You’ll have to stay for supper. Buchanan – that’s my Bucky – should be home soon. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Aye, I do,” Steve replies, stepping closer and ruffling the hair at the back of his head. “But I was just down by my Ma’s place, and well… it be in a right sorry state. What happened?”

Sheena’s face falls. “I’m sorry, Stevie. I wish we were meeting again under better circumstances, but… they’re gone.”

“Gone?”

“Aye, well. First your brother left, went up North to the Dunaidhs for a ten-year spell. Due back in a couple years time, don’t you worry about him now,” Sheena tells him, and Steve has the sneaking suspicion the rest is downhill from there. “Then, it was your Nan. Natural causes of course. Went peaceful-like in her sleep. Your Ma was wanting to send word, but she didn’t have the money for a courier,” she further explains, though Steve is not insensitive to the fact it would have been prohibitively expensive. Even an oral message was a luxury they could ill-afford.

“And finally… well…” she hesitates.

“What happened to Ma?” Steve inquires, bracing himself for the heart of this sad tale.

“Well, not long after you left, your Ma happened upon a stallion. He was a strong one and beautiful, black as night, but tame as a lamb when it was your Ma or Nan who was handling him,” she begins, nervously twisting the cloth in her hands. “They had him through that first winter, but by the time the first spring buds had grown on the trees, he was gone. Ran away, he did. Oh, your family was sore about that one, but sure enough, come next winter, the stallion was back. Did that every year like clockwork, coming and going as he pleased, until your Ma stopped trying to keep the beast. ‘Mind of his own,’ she’d say. ‘Only here to wait out the winter in our stables.’”

It’s an odd turn of events, but nothing that would explain the disappearance of his mother. Steve resists the urge to tell Sheena to cut the story short, to get to the meat of the matter. He can already see the woman struggling with the retelling as it is, and she will get to the end in her own time. It’s not like Steve has anyplace to go; so he waits, impatient but silent.

“But by the fifth year, after your Nan had passed, your Ma… she took the stallion to the laird’s mill to help with transporting new millstones. It was her turn to be helping with grinding the grain, you see. The laird… he saw the horse, wanted it, and offered your Ma a pretty penny for him, but she weren’t of a mind to sell. ‘The horse be his own master,’ she had told him.”

A creeping sense of foreboding accompanies this tidbit. Steve is no fool; he knows where this story ends and can already see how the road twists towards its final destination.

“Where is our laird now?” he says, his tone even but edging on rage.

“Stevie–”

“He came in the dead of night like the thieving coward he is and murdered my Ma to steal her horse; is that the short of it?”

“There weren’t nothing they could prove, but–”

“Bollocks! You wouldn’t be telling me about the scoundrel if he be not at the root of it,” Steve turns away, stamping back towards the road. “I’ll find him myself.” He knows the way. Even as a small lad, he knew where his laird’s homestead lay.

But Sheena calls after him, “You won’t find him, Stevie.” He pauses, allowing her to continue, “He’s dead or least that’s what folk be saying.”

Steve returns to her threshold, open to hearing the rest.

“You be right about one thing. One night, some thieves, they came and well… no one right knows what happened, but what was left spoke of violence. Best they figure, the thieves did kill your poor Ma then tried to steal the stallion, but…”

_Of course the rich bastard wouldn’t do the deed himself when he could send hired thugs._

“–In the morn, all that was left was her body strangled in its bed, and outside strewn about be the entrails of at least three assailants. With the scene as it was, it was hard to count, but there be at least two and a half livers between all the… pieces, and the magistrate – when he recovered hisself enough to speak without retching – said that there be gut enough for at least three men, and…” Sheena stumbles on her words, fingers wiping under her eyes. “I’m sorry, Stevie. You prob’ly don’t need no details. But our laird, well… he disappeared not too long after, him and his entire family. No one dare says the two are connected aloud, but… he did want your Ma’s horse something fierce. The folk around here say she haunts the old ruins and might have avenged herself. They even brought in the parish priest to try and cleanse the lot, but I reckon the whole county figures your home be cursed and the whole estate poisoned by the deed. We have a new laird now, bought the cursed lands for a pittance, truth be told, which is why it’d do no good to march up to the laird’s house and be demanding justice.”

Steve’s shoulders slumped as he covers his face in both hands, his rage giving way to impotent grief.

“And her body?” he manages, when he trusts his tone once again.

“The new laird had her blessed and interred next to your Da, God rest their souls. Used real wood for a proper coffin and had a stone marker made for the both of them and everything. It were nice, Stevie,” she tries to console him.

But Steve is alone now and without purpose, even denied his due vengeance by providence. With his family gone and home decimated, where can he go? What is he to do now?

He says as much to Sheena.

“I’ll talk to my Da, but you can probably stay with us for a spell until you get your legs under you,” she suggests. “There’s always work on the farm that needs doing. You can help in the meantime.”

It’s a short-term solution, of course; something to keep his hands busy until he finds a more permanent settlement. Perhaps he can negotiate rental terms of his own plot that he and Duggie can work together. His brother will be coming home in two years’ time, and it would be nice if he didn’t return to a dilapidated ruin.

_Now there’s an idea._

“You know what the new laird is planning for my Ma’s old lands?” Steve asks, his mind focused now that he has a goal. Duggie will have a home to come back to if it’s the last thing Steve does.

Sheena seems to consider it. “Well, you’re welcome to build anything upon the grounds if you be brave enough to try. The current laird has been letting that plot go fallow these past years, but I’m sure he’d prefer the profit of a harvest instead.”

And so, Steve resolves to stay on as a farmhand, paying back his room and board with labor, while patching up his childhood home during the leisure time he is afforded (with Bucky’s help when the man is able to spare it). Of course, he’s grateful for the roof over his head and for the sounds of others to drown out his own sorrows, but with so much to do and so little time to do it, the entire venture is slow-going.

He’s home for a month before he’s back at the river.

Bucky had remembered that wee Stevie had been quite the talented fisherman before he left, and in her delicate condition, Sheena had wanted some trout if Steve is up to the task. Even though the thought of returning to the river where he near drowned is like a bucket of ice water poured down his back, Steve feels he can’t refuse, not when he is still reliant on their hospitality. And so he agrees, gathering their fish traps and rope before returning to his old stomping grounds, with Bucky in tow.

Steve is glad for the company, even as he triple checks the knots on his rope for strength and integrity, his hands sweaty and shaking a touch on the braid.

“Where did you learn to do up the ropes like that?” Bucky asks, observing Steve’s work.

_An imaginary friend._

“Don’t right know. Just… came to me, I guess,” Steve says, having decided the ropes will hold with one last tug. “Spent a lot of time out here by myself, and… guess I just had the time to figure it out.”

Having removed his outer clothing, he steps out into the stream, standing up to his ankles for a spell to get used to the idea of venturing deeper once again.

“Anything the matter?” Bucky inquires when Steve has dallied a hair too long.

 _Aye,_ he wants to say.

“No,” he replies instead. “Been a while since I done this, might not be so good as I once was.”

And with that, he glides forward into the water, letting it rise from his ankles to his knees to his waist, setting the traps as Tony had once shown him in his childhood. Though the water seems colder and he’s not quite so nimble as before, the skill is well-practiced and comes back to him easy as breathing. By the time he emerges back onto the bank, he blames his shaking and unsteady gait on the chill of the water, drying off as much as possible on a sunny rock as they wait. 

“I remember before I left, you were the best fisherman in the county,” Bucky says, trying to skip a stone across the river. “If the Abernathies had any sense at all, they would have put you out on the loch instead of infilling walls and re-thatching roofs.”

Steve selects his own stone, sending it sailing 1-2-3-4 downriver before it inevitably sinks.

“You’re good at that.”

“Had a lot of practice,” Steve says. He had spent a lot of time between setting the traps and collecting his catch to sit and determine the correct weight and shape of stones, experimenting with the right way to flick is wrist to send the lot of them flying. If he remembers a young man clothed in black sitting beside him, it was only his imagination at play, dreaming up a companion in his loneliness.

“Say… I didn’t want to ask while you was waist-deep in the wet, but…” Bucky waffles, turning to face Steve. “You ever meet a kelpie out here?”

“That’s just an old wives’ tale to keep children from the river and strange beasts and to warn away woman from entertaining the company of strangers,” Steve replies resolutely, repeating his Ma’s old refrain. “Never seen nothing of the sort.”

“If anyone would have seen one, it would have been you.”

“Aye, well…” he confirms, “Been out here long enough and ain’t ever seen the like.”

“You must have gotten good at swimming, though,” Bucky ponders, but when Steve doesn’t say anything, he cants his head back to regard the man. “A fisherman who can’t swim, eh? First I heard of it.”

“I– I had a bad experience as a lad.” Steve remembers getting washed away clear to the loch, almost drowning, breathing in so much water his lungs had burned, and dark dark eyes watching him from under the green. His Ma had tucked him into bed after, made his favorite bread sweetened with honey, and sent Duggie to recover his tunic from the river bank where he reckoned he had been pulled in. He still remembers his Ma with a near-overwhelming sense of sadness mixed with anger he immediately tamps down, buries deep. He can’t lose it, not in front of Bucky, not in front of anyone really. If the laird who had her murdered ever deigns to show his face again, Steve will be there to hack it off.

“I could teach you, if you be willing,” Bucky offers, hefting himself up to a standing position and holding his hand out to Steve. “A man should know how to swim in these parts. Never know when the river will take you one of these days.”

Steve accepts, clasping Bucky’s arm and letting himself be pulled up. “I suppose you be right about that.”

* * *

Bucky takes Steve to the tavern that night, to celebrate their generous catch and spend some time away from the missus. _Stevie could use a break; he’s been having a tough time of it,_ he had reasoned when she argued that he had responsibilities at home, what with their two children and one on the way. So, Sheena had told him not to spend too much money and warned him he best be back before second sleep or risk dozing amongst the sheep for a fortnight.

“Love you, dearest,” Bucky had called out over his shoulder as he pushed Steve outside and into the night air.

He would prefer not to spend what little money he had on drink, but Bucky had been insistent.

And so Steve had relented. “One drink,” he said, holding up an index finger, “Maybe a game of cards, and then we go home.”

“Aye, one drink,” Bucky had confirmed.

Of course, one pint had turned into a pitcher – _It be served in a single vessel, Stevie; it counts as the one_ – and within the hour, they’re both sloshed.

Bucky is grasping the table’s edge, trying to keep himself upright and steady. “Sheena… Oh Sheena, she be the light of my life. Best decision ever marryin’ tha’ lass,” he slurs. “We should get you a lass, too. Wha’ do you like? The wife, her friends be fair and unspoken for. Isla is lookin’, and she’s got great big–” he makes a crude gesture, cupping his hands and rounding them out in front of his chest.

Steve chuckles. “Careful. The missus may catch you starin’.”

“Hearts,” Bucky finishes. “Tha’s what the lads like these days. Big, beautiful, _round_ hearts,” he pinches the air in front of his chest to demonstrate. “Sheena’s got the nicest set.”

“Of hearts?”

“Aye, and they be growin’ with the pregnancy,” he narrows his eyes at his companion, “but she be mine; find your own.”

And perhaps it’s the alcohol creating a buzzy haze thrumming through his mind or Bucky’s rather vocal encouragement, but Steve decides it is high time he start looking, so his eyes roam the room, assessing the assembled _all-male_ patrons for potential (short-term) lovers.

They’re in the countryside, so the pickings are slim, but there’s a man in the corner, young and trim – around his age even – with dark eyes and a neatly-groomed beard, wearing an outer cloak that is clean but discrete.

And he is staring directly at Steve.

Something’s screaming in the back of his mind, but Steve ignores it, still pleasantly inebriated from the booze and letting his cock take the reins of his decision-making process. He abruptly pushes out his chair, tells Bucky he needs to take a piss, and heads out through the back of the establishment to lean heavily against a stout tree, waiting five minutes to give the other man time to do the same.

Sure enough, the man follows right after him into the dark. Steve can barely see him with the light cast from the tavern revealing his fine profile and little else, but it’s undeniably the stranger who had been making eyes at him all night. It’s foolish, downright dangerous, Steve knows – _he knows_ – but such concerns of legality never stopped him in the past. Sure, every Sunday he made his penance (privately) to God, but he could never shake the urge. He periodically indulges from time to time (though less often than he had interested parties). He is working on it, and he promises himself he’ll do better next time.

After tonight, that is.

There’s no mistaking the stranger’s intention. He steps right up to Steve, with all the confidence of someone used to the chase, to the secret games men like them play.

“Let’s be quick about it; my friend’s inside,” Steve says, slipping his hands around the other man’s waist, sliding it towards the back and dipping down to capture his lips.

For a few seconds, all is right with the world. The man tucked against his body is warm and solid, and Steve wonders (just a tiny bit) how something that feels so right could be so very wrong. It’s a trial, he knows, a trial he often fails, true, but no one’s perfect.

But when the man in his arms breaks their kiss and pushes away, Steve realizes he’s made a grave, potentially-fatal error.

“What?” the stranger says, his voice a bit high-pitched and his fingers raised to lightly touch his swollen lips.

 _Play dumb._ It’s his only option.

So Steve quickly throws up his hands in mock surprise as he leaps from the other man and slams into the tree behind him. “You ain’t Elsie,” he cries out, feigning disgust. A belated (and thoroughly unhelpful) thought flits throw his drunken mind: He had heard the Church castrates degenerates like him, if they don’t burn him first.

The figure cocks his head to the side. “Sorry to disappoint, Stevie.”

_Fuck._

Steve practically runs away from the not-quite-a-stranger then, slamming open the tavern doors and rushing past, nearly lifting and pulling along a protesting Bucky on his way out the front entrance.

He’s so fucked. The man recognized him. He’s probably an old playmate of Duggie’s back from when they were children. He knew _his name_.

_Oh God. He knew Steve’s name._

And now Steve must wait, wondering if and when the other shoe will drop, whether the handsome (not-a-)stranger will show up at Bucky and Sheena’s door, the magistrate following close behind. Then the man would point out Steve and denounce him for his sexual proclivities. Will his hosts be appalled to have brought such a man into their house and around their children, no less? Would suspicion fall on Bucky as well? Steve doesn’t know, but the thought of bringing trouble into the home of folks who have been nothing but kind to him haunts him the next several nights…

This is precisely why he doesn’t drink.

* * *

The magistrate never materializes, but it’s not too long after the incident at the tavern that day workers show up to his Ma’s old home, aiming to rebuild the house and clear out the weeds that had taken over the fields.

“What is all this then?” Steve had asked when he had come upon the scene with precious few daylight hours to spare. His family had no real claim to the land – it belonging to the local laird who had purchased it – but Steve had been fixing up the plot no one dared plow for his own use, hoping to take up tenancy as soon as he managed to make it habitable. And now, his dream seemed in jeopardy.

“The laird heard that Sarah’s boy had returned and was trying to fix up the place all on his lonesome. He wants to lend a hand, he does. Though you must be brave or foolish and desperate even yet to try to reclaim land given way to ghosts,” the foreman tells him. “Truth told, this place gives me the frights, but… the laird be paying double to get it up to livable standards.” He shrugs. “Brought along enough men to get the job done within the day so no one be staying long.”

The work is much faster with several hands on board, and true to the foreman’s word, they’re done within the day. They had even weatherproofed the house’s walls and rebuilt the hearth, though Steve would be responsible for its maintenance over the coming years.

And so, Steve bids thanks and farewell to Bucky and Sheena, moving into his childhood home that very night, but unlike his neighbors’ home, it’s much too still and quiet here, absent the sounds of life and other people. It is the first time Steve had ever been truly alone.

He finds he does not much care for the experience.

But he is not so churlish as to complain. His family may be gone, but he is alive; he has friends and a brother still out there, and apparently his new laird is a generous man. He curls up small on his straw mattress and draws the wool blanket over him, resolving to travel to the laird’s homestead in the morrow and thank the man in person.

Tomorrow is a new day, full of possibilities, and Steve aims to start off their relationship right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wonder who his new laird could be?


	3. The Devil You Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve meets a man with a familiar face – too familiar, really. Though it has been ten years since last he saw him, Tony hasn’t aged a single day. He must be the devil come to tempt Steve, to sway him from the light. Steve knows all this, but he can’t stay away, and when the English attack, he trusts the one person more fearsome than the invading forces. 
> 
> Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I replaced the “No Smut” tag with “Light Smut” because sometimes the course of events change a little when you’re writing, and there is now a little nonexplicit smut. 
> 
> Kelpies are said to have cloven hooves for feet (even in human form), and early Christians associated them with the devil. 
> 
> Also, medicine in the Middle Ages was seriously weird, guys. There was this idea in humour-based medication that you could die if you had too much of a build-up of semen, and many clergyman were advised that celibacy would negatively affect their health and lead to their deaths. Masturbation was a no-no (for men mostly, women were prescribed genital massage to treat ‘suffocation of the womb,’ a potentially deadly condition), and wet-dreams were on thin ice (basically they were sort of okay as long as you didn’t masturbate to produce them, but you still had to seek absolution before celebrating mass if you had an involuntary wet dream). Sometimes, you could balance the humors by blood-letting (or crying, exercising, or bathing), so that was an option that is much less fun than sex. STDs were still a thing, with “leprosy” being the main concern (syphilis arrived to Europe in the late 15th century). 
> 
> And finally, I modeled the laird’s castle after Dunstaffnage Castle, one of Scotland’s oldest stone ‘castles of enceinte’ (defensive enclosed or fortified castle) built in the 13th century as the seat of the MacDougall lords of Lorn.

Steve dresses in his Sunday best, his second tunic pulled over the hemp underclothing and woolen hose with a cape atop. Though he is fairly certain the laird means for him to work his family’s old plot (and it’s not like there’s much competition if he desires otherwise), Steve doesn’t want to appear a vagrant, too disheveled and destitute to deserve consideration of tenancy. He slips his feet into his well-worn leather boots and laces up the front before heading out to the main homestead, where he assumes the new laird has taken up residence.

Steve remembers seeing the laird’s residence – a stone castle of enceinte built upon a raised mount and fortified by tall, foreboding stone walls that enclosed the main house, tower, chapel, and accompanying structures – several times while growing up. It had been the seat of the laird who owned their small fiefdom and served as the home of the man’s family as well as several members of his guard and support staff. Wee Stevie had often imagined what it would be like to live in such a grand house with so many rooms filled with furniture and tapestries and other luxuries his family could ill-afford. What would an individual do with so much excess? Steve supposes that wealth precluded starvation and exposure, permitting a level of security he had never experienced but thought must be nice.

He approaches the castle, and after giving his name and nature of his business, he awaits his laird’s verdict on whether he is to be granted an audience at all (though by the look on the guard’s face when he spied Steve’s muddy boots and the threadbare state of his underclothing peeking out from under the hem of his best tunic, he assumes a rejection is the more likely outcome).

So, imagine Steve’s surprise that not only has the laird accepted his call, but he is to be led to his private apartments within.

“He’s not one to be suffering the company of guests, known or otherwise,” the guard tells him. “Usually, the lady of the house entertains ‘em on the laird’s behalf. You must know him special from before.” He side-eyes Steve, trying to figure out how he could possibly be important, because surely he must be to deserve such consideration.

“He is married, then?” It’s a short walk to the north tower, but the guard’s pace is slow. He is in a chatty mood, perhaps subtly trying to curry favor with this visitor of significant (but unknown) import.

“No, but he has a woman running his affairs as his right-hand, a female bailiff. You ever hear of such a thing?”

It is unusual, true, but “My Ma ran things just fine after my Da died,” Steve replies stiffly.

“I meant no offense, lad, just saying when a grown man be letting a woman rule everything inside and out, it’s a touch odd is all, though no one would accuse our laird of _not_ being a wee bit strange,” the guard states, in a tone that spoke of more familiarity than should be granted such a short acquaintance. “Where did you say you knew him from before?”

“I didn’t,” Steve admits, before thinking better of it and clarifying, “I don’t.”

He looks disappointed. “You be as tight-lipped as Pepper, but I suppose he favors the quiet ones.”

_For someone who knows this of his employer, the guard sure doesn’t care to ingratiate himself if it meant curtailing his running commentary._

Having reached the appropriate door – a heavy oak one lined with iron hinges – the guard swings it open, revealing an antechamber outfitted with a carved oak table and matching chairs to receive guests alongside storage cabinets, and at the head of the aforementioned table reclines a rather familiar figure. Steve’s breath catches in his throat and dies an ignoble death, ending in a light wheeze. It’s the man Steve had kissed, the shadowy figure from the tavern, wearing that self-same discrete cloak he had donned that fated night, but more than that, with Steve now sober and the room bathed in the harsh light of day, he can see another, more disturbing resemblance.

“Right, so… this be where I leave you,” the guard says. He clearly wishes to stay, but one look at his employer had nixed that idea. So he exits, leaving the two alone. Steve barely notices his absence, presently transfixed on the lone figure at the table, all intentions of thanking the man long forgotten.

“Good day to you, Stevie. Long time no see,” Tony – and it is definitely his imaginary friend from childhood – sits before him.

 _He hasn’t aged a day,_ Steve thinks nervously. Clearly, Tony is unnatural, not human. The memories of that fated day – the morning he near drowned – rush back to him: the river, Tony’s home at the bottom of the loch, the wine skin that still sat among Steve’s scant possessions back home, hung up alongside his canteen. If Tony is real, then–

“Where were you?” Steve’s voice is low, a near whisper.

“Hm?”

“Where were you when she died?” he says ever louder, all the grief, that helpless rage that had threatened to consume him, concentrated and redirected towards a singular target. Steve stomps over, uncaring of the man’s supernatural nature and the potential danger he presents. “You promised me! You promised she’d be fine! You sent the black stallion, didn’t you?” he accuses. “Didn’t you?”

Tony stands to meet him. “I’m sorry, Stevie.”

“She died because of that horse, because the laird before you wanted it bad enough to murder her for it!”

“And he died not too long after,” Tony states, his demeanor infuriatingly calm though the knuckles of his left hand clutching the back of his chair strain white.

That may be true, but–

“That changes _nothing_.” Steve knows it, had known it when first he had heard the news, but his vengeance had given him something to look forward to, something to do in the brief span of time he had hope for some semblance of justice regardless of how unlikely the execution of it would have been.

And Tony had denied him that purpose, leaving Steve bereft.

Tony grasps his shoulder, rubbing his thumb in a soothing circle into the join of his muscle. “I know, lad. You think I don’t? And I’m sorry. I tried, Stevie. I tried to help your family while you were away, because you loved them, and you worried over them, but I was too late. She was already gone by the time the villains came upon me.”

“…You were there that night?”

“You don’t have to worry about them,” Tony assures him. “They paid; they paid with their very lives, and then I came here, and he paid, too.”

“What did you do to them?”

“Nothing you be wanting to hear, trust me.”

But Steve does; he must know. “Try me.”

“No, Stevie. There are things you cannot un-hear, and how those men died… that be one of them,” Tony’s eyes drift away to settle on a point over Steve’s shoulder. “I– I wanted to tell you how sorry I was the other night when I went out into the dark, and–”

“That was a mistake,” Steve says all-too-quickly. “I thought you were a dame. Effie.”

“You said Elsie that night, and there be no dames in the tavern beside,” Tony murmurs as he draws near, his breath ghosting against Steve’s lips.

Steve has the overwhelming urge to indulge, to meet him the rest of the way, take his lips and whatever else Tony is willing to give now that they’re alone and unlikely to be disturbed. A curl of desire awakens in the pit of his stomach, inflaming his flesh and beckoning him closer to the handsome man before him. No one else had to know… Tony himself wouldn’t speak a word of it, he is certain. It would be easy…

_This is a mistake._

He steps back. “I must be going. I cannot be here right now.”

“Stevie–”

“You cannot keep me,” Steve says firmly, withdrawing further from Tony. For a moment, Steve thinks he’s going to stick fast, like he did that day in the loch, but he comes away easily. Tony withdraws his hand to let it drop beside him.

He looks like he wants to say more on the subject, but Steve is already at the door. So Tony calls out instead: “Don’t be a stranger, lad.”

Steve pauses but doesn’t respond, looking back at Tony one last time, at his ethereally-beautiful face untouched by time or age. Then, he pulls open the door to find the guard and requests to be shown out.

“Your business is concluded then?” The guard asks him.

Steve thinks about Tony, about their near kiss, about the violence he perpetrated against people who had crossed him (crossed them both, if he was of a mind to consider the implications).

“…Aye,” and with that he exits the laird’s castle, heading back home.

* * *

Sheena and Bucky invite Steve to supper, (rightly) thinking him unused to the solitude of his new home. They talk, laugh, and make merry, but Steve himself is quieter than usual, more contemplative, and so after the dishes have been collected, washed, and put away, he and Bucky step outside for a breath of fresh air. Bucky offers Steve the chair while he takes a nearby stool. They sit like that for a while, listening to the crickets chattering away.

“You got a lot on your mind?” Bucky asks him after a spell. “You barely said more’n five sentences over supper.”

“It be nothing, Buck,” Steve replies, unconvincingly.

“Truthfully?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with.” _Nothing that a dip in a cold loch won’t fix._

But the thought of the nearby loch and its former resident inspires the opposite effect in Steve. He’s glad for the dark so Bucky can’t see the telltale blush that is surely lighting up his features.

But Bucky seems to guess the nature of his silence anyway, though some of the details are off. “If it be a woman–”

“It’s not a woman,” Steve assures him.

“I’m not saying it be a woman, but you seem out of sorts when one would think it be a time for celebration. Your family plot fixed up right nice, if I do say so myself, and the missus be hinting of single friends, all gentle-like. I’m sure you barely noticed–”

“Oh, you mean the lass she invited tonight and sat across from me? Ainsley?” Steve replies brightly. “And when Sheena said our wee babes would be so handsome, we’d have to give them foul names so as to fool the sith into thinking them not worth the trouble of stealing? Those hints, yeah?” Sheena was really taking his bachelorhood as the personal challenge it isn’t, and over time, she had become as subtle as a boulder dropped through a thatched roof. “No, I cannot say I noticed that,” he finishes blandly.

“…Ainsley be a sweet lass, and pretty beside,” Bucky points out.

“Aye.”

“And she did not hold your interest in the slightest.”

Steve can’t argue with that observation. It wasn’t her fault he had been built wrong, had gotten his wires crossed somewhere along the way.

Unaware of his friend’s inner turmoil, Bucky continues, “Which tells me that there is another on your mind, one so fair as to occupy your thoughts when a bonny lass be sitting in front of your very eyes.”

Steve thinks of dark eyes, plush lips, and the scratch of a neatly-trimmed beard against his face.

“There might be… someone, but she’s not what she seems,” Steve admits, hesitating to add: “She is a dangerous sort, and any courtship would be scandalous if word got out.” Especially if anyone ever realized _she_ is a _he_.

Bucky sighs, closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose. “…She be a leprous prostitute then?” he asks. “Stevie, are you needing a doctor?”

“What? No! I’m not diseased!”

“Then there be time yet–”

“She’s not either!” At least Steve is fairly certain the sith don’t suffer mortal ailments. “It’s not like that; there is nothing wrong with our bodies–” except that they sport matching equipment. Probably.

 _Did Tony possess a pecker?_ Steve won’t ever be in the position to find out, or so he tells himself.

“So it be a question of the soul?”

_Yes._

“…Let us forget this whole conversation, yeah?” Steve says instead.

“You’d be happier with her than any other?” his friend presses anyway.

“I do not know.” It might be nice to have more than an anonymous tumble in the dark, and Tony had been kind to him thus far, whatever his true nature. It also didn’t hurt that Steve found his form pleasing and that the attraction had clearly been mutual.

Bucky is silent for a moment, organizing his thoughts before speaking again. “All of us only get one try at living, and even Christ hisself associated with prostitutes and criminals. Who are we to judge and shun the like when he found them worthy of knowing?” he reasons. “So… if she’s not leprous and you truly fancy her to the point of distraction, then what be the harm of it? She is from a different county or the burghs, yeah? No one need be the wiser of her past. I will not be breathing a word of it, you can be sure of that.”

“I do _not_ fancy a prostitute,” Steve states, his tone firm, final.

“Right, right… you do not. But I am saying – just saying, mind you – that with a lady of ill-repute, there be… options,” Bucky says, his voice low and carefully judgment-free. “And supposing you had made the acquaintance of such a lass… well, I know celibacy be an unhealthy habit and more than one man has died of the affliction, so I can see the need every once and a while, unmarried as you are and ill-able to afford the periodic bloodlettings provided to monasteries. Perhaps a wife will do you some good, and if she have a… checkered past, that be no one’s business but you and her.”

Perhaps Steve can trust Bucky with the truth. “She be a demon, Bucky.”

Or half-truth as it was. Bucky may accept Steve’s love of a whore, but a man, particularly a supernatural one of unknown providence, is a different thing altogether.

But Bucky waves off his concern with a chuckle. “Aye, no need to brag, man. I’m sure the lass is a right beastie in the sack, all things considered. But worry not, this be the last I speak of it.”

And so Bucky and Steve continue to sit together in the dying light, lost in companionable silence until Steve bids them farewell and heads out, homeward bound.

* * *

(Un)Fortunately, Tony doesn’t stay away forever. He is the laird of these fields, and Steve’s landlord to boot. And so, when Tony graces his door for an impromptu visit, Steve feels obliged to let him in despite his reservations. He leads him into the dining area nearest the door, his home being much too small and simple for a real parlor (or separate rooms for that matter).

And so they exchange stilted small talk in a parody of civility while Tony surveys Steve’s home, his eyes flitting between the rebuilt hearth in the center with the hole above for (poor) ventilation causing the home to smell of burnt wood and coal smoke, the sparse furniture, then finally settle on the wine skin hung up on a hook near his cloak over the straw mattress in the far corner.

“You kept it,” Tony states abruptly.

“Aye… When you have very little, you keep everything to the end of its usefulness.”

“I suppose so.”

Steve tires of this game. “Why did you come?”

“I think you know why. There be something between you and I, and I think you want it, too. Would you deny it, Stevie?”

All this – his sinful attraction to men, the thoughts that plagued him no matter how much he prayed to be otherwise – perhaps the root of it all is the man standing before him. “Did you do something… untoward to me as a child, something that made me as I am?”

“I never touched you; you know that,” Tony spits out, his brow crinkled and expression disturbed.

Of course he hadn’t, but–

“No, I mean… in the spiritual sense.”

Tony crosses his arms, his eyes steady on Steve. “I have no idea what you be going on about. If you mean to accuse me of putting a spell to you, then I did nothing of the sort.”

 _Demons be liars,_ Steve thinks. He had asked one to look after his family, even unknowingly, and now they are all–

“It’s my fault; I own it,” he confesses. “I made a deal with a devil, and that be the reason my family died.”

Now Tony has lost his patience, sounding offended. “I was only trying to help them,” he snaps.

“Aye, and when you were planting the seeds of these thoughts in my head – these wrong, unspeakable desires – that was you trying to help as well?” Steve counters, advancing on the creature wearing the face of a man but stopping short to stare down on him – on it.

“What desires you speak of? Be plain in your speech, lad. Out with it.”

How can he play dumb? He must have known, all this time. It’s why he is here, isn’t it? He means to bring Steve to further ruin, like he hasn’t done enough damage already.

“All the other lads, they be chasing after wee lasses when we was small, but not me. Never me. What did you do to me, Tony, to make me all wrong, to make me desire…”

_You._

Tony doesn’t back down, but he stands pensive for a moment before responding, “…If you be what you lot call a sodomite, that be your God’s doing. I had no hand in it,” he claims. “Though if you be wanting my opinion on the matter, I don’t think your God much cares either way, else he wouldn’t’a put the same inclination in the other animals of his creation. Only humans think it an evil affliction to be suppressed, eradicated no less.”

“So you admit you’re not human, do you?”

“Were it not obvious, Stevie?” Tony isn’t even trying to hide his nature, a fact which would make Steve worry if he wasn’t so angry. “I told you my name not too long ago, and you could bare pronounce it. Though I have come to like the name ‘Tony’ and will be keeping it.”

“…Are you a demon then, a follower of Satan?” _Will Steve have to call the parish priest for an exorcism?_

Tony sighs deeply then fixes Steve with a flat stare. “My people be living in these lands long before that ridiculous creed reached our shores to infect the lot of you. Follower of Satan? Humans like you brought him here, or the notion more like. You be the ones believing the new gods and forgetting the old.”

“There is only one God,” Steve insists. That had always been the lesson every Sunday since he was a babe, reinforced week after week. One God, split into three selves, to watch over his flock, forever and always since the beginning of time itself. Omniscient and just and loving, he will never put his children through trials they had no chance of surmounting. Steve only had to try harder, to give himself over to the light, to have faith in his ultimate salvation, and he will be saved.

Or at least that’s what the Church had always insisted.

Tony seems unimpressed by the declaration. “Sometimes I forget how short your lives are. Quick as the smoldering flame after a night’s burn or the mayfly, they be, and so it is the way with your stories as well. Passed down parent to child on and on, but a break here and there of a few decades – a century mayhap – and all is forgotten.”

“What are you, then?” Steve asks, his tone harsh and wary of communing with the demon longer than necessary but curious of its tricks even still.

Tony graces him with an enigmatic smile that under different circumstances may be construed as flirtatious. “Someone that finds you interesting and knows you find me the same. So, what be holding you back, Stevie?” He grasps his shoulder fondly.

Steve bats him off, his temper rising. “You know damn well what! Back off,” he replies. It’s a trick. Tony must know what he’s doing to him, how he’s exploiting Steve’s weakness…

He must be the cause of it all.

“Oh, now I want you to make me.”

That does it.

Steve shoves his laird at the shoulder, but the man dips in past his defenses to kiss him on the corner of the mouth (his aim not being perfect in the scuffle). Steve snarls in response, pushing him away full-bodied, knocking Tony onto the table, but Tony has a hold of his tunic, so when he falls, they both do, tumbling together across the surface.

“Let me go, demon!” Steve rages, his hands on Tony’s own to extract them from his clothing.

But Tony is stronger than he looks. Distantly, Steve knows Tony could easily escape. He could push Steve against clay walls, do whatever he did to those murderous intruders so long ago, and Steve could do nothing to prevent it.

But deep down, Steve knows Tony won’t.

“Let go!” he shouts in frustration.

“I already have.”

And it’s true. His wrists are pinned under Steve’s hands, Steve’s body slotted between Tony’s legs and hovering over Tony as the other man lies prone on the table. Steve’s rapid breathing mingles with Tony’s own, and his pupils are blown wide with only a ring of iris along the edge.

It would be so easy…

Steve dips down, meeting Tony’s lips, drinking from them like a drowned man who had wondered forty years in the desert, long denied respite from a society who would seek to deny him the simple pleasures: companionship, a helpmate of his choosing… love.

Tony is helping him out of his clothes now, flinging them off to the side, uncaring where they land. Steve undoes his belt to help, dropping his braes and shimmying out of woolen hose to free his cock, before stripping Tony’s lower body as well, and–

Okay, Tony _does_ have a pecker and a rather impressive one at that. Mystery solved.

Their coupling is rough at first, born of fierce desire but still edged in fading anger and a touch of fear. Tony holds him through it, smoothing out his thrusts into something gentler, more tender, and when Steve cums, he clings to Tony, his shoulders shaking and the skin of Tony’s shoulder becoming damp under his eyes as Tony rubs circles in his back and shushes him softly.

He pulls out and away, suddenly sheepish as he collects his clothes and throws Tony’s back to him over his shoulder.

It can’t happen again, and he tells Tony as much. Tony simply nods, acquiescing to Steve’s wishes but saying nothing.

* * *

It happens again.

And again.

And again.

Tony comes over mostly during his solo inspections of his lands, but occasionally, he’ll leave something of his behind for Steve, forcing the man to return it to his castle in person (though if Steve thought hard on it, he could have just waited for Tony’s next inevitable visit or left it at the gate with a guard if he truly desired not to see Tony again).

Occasionally, Steve stays for supper and then the infamous female bailiff – Pepper, he learns – boards him in the guest quarters overnight. _It’s too dangerous to travel the roads in the dark,_ Tony had insisted. _What if bandits come upon you?_

But more often than not, it is Tony himself that comes for him during the course of the night.

The first time it had happened, Steve had heard a series of light knocks coming from a wooden panel inserted into the stone wall after first sleep. Steve had lit a candle, crossing the short distance to knock back against the self-same panel, thinking it may be scurrying rats causing a ruckus in the walls. When the panel had slide open instead, revealing Tony in a dark passageway, Steve had almost dropped his candle.

“Up for a wee bit of company then?” Tony had inquired.

When Tony had come through completely, Steve dips his head inside, looking within the compartment and finding it stretching beyond the aura of his flame.

Tony had watched his puzzled exploration. “There be secret roads within the walls. Convenient, yeah?”

“Very,” Steve had agreed before greeting the man with a kiss.

* * *

“Would it please you to send for your brother?” Tony asks him one day when they are knee-deep in the river, inspecting Steve’s fish traps. “I could arrange to have him released early, returned to the farm. That would be pleasing to you, will it not?”

“Aye, but the cost would be high, and I cannot leave the farm unattended for so long to retrieve him,” Steve replies, moving the wine skin slung around his neck to the back, his attention on his slippery catch. Sheena would like a couple. He makes a note to himself to swing by on the way back.

“I can send a letter to the Dunaidhs with coin enough to pay for the inconvenience of early release.”

He looks up at Tony. “You would do that?”

“Aye,” and now he’s smiling, too, “For you.”

Steve could kiss him, if they weren’t so out in the open. “I would like that very much.”

“Excellent. Consider the deed done.”

* * *

When they lie in bed later – Steve having brought his laird several fish for his supper and once again asked to stay over in the guest room – Steve tickles Tony’s beard, marveling how there’s not a grey hair in the lot. His appearance unchanged from when Steve had been a boy.

“Folks will notice eventually that you do not age like the rest of us,” he comments idly. “They be thinking you hold the keys to the Fountain of Youth and refusing to share.”

“I be older than I look.”

“Clearly.”

Tony turns to face him, his fingers running tracks through Steve’s mussed-up waves. “Would you prefer me older still?”

Steve raises his head, propping his upper body up on his elbow. “What do you mean? You cannot change your age just like that.”

Tony draws himself up until he’s fully seated, rotating bodily to face Steve. He cups his hands, running them over his face and hair, making himself weathered and wrinkled, his hair white and thinned to show his liver-spotted scalp. “Better?” he asks, smiling to show off his yellowed teeth set in receding gums visible behind age-thinned lips, while the skin and flesh of his chest remain youthful.

“How did you do that!” Steve visibly recoils from the man, nearly falling off his side of the bed, but internally reprimands himself for being so superficial. He sits up and edges closer to examine the change now that the shock has waned. “That be your true face?”

“No, this face be false, as much glamour as the other,” Tony says, shaking his head to restore youth to his features and lush density to his curls. “I can look however I desire, and what I desire is to be of a form pleasing to you.”

“It would please me to see your true face.”

“That is the last thing you want. Trust me, Stevie.” Now, his hair shifts to grey and his skin sags but oddly manages to retain its supple elasticity so as to give the appearance of a melted candle topped with rat fur. “How about this?”

Steve finds the process unsettling. “Stop it. We do not age near so quick as all that” _nor in so disturbing a fashion._

That inspires a chuckle as Tony’s face shifts to rights. “You sure? It seemed like only yesterday you were but a babe, and now look at you. It feels like I merely blinked, and yet here you be: a man grown tall and strong.”

“…Just how old are you?” Steve asks, giving him a sidelong glance.

Tony merely tut-tuts. “One should never ask after another’s age,” he replies coyly, tapping his chin. “It’s considered offensive in polite company.”

“You know nothing about how we age, yet you be absorbing the finer points of our social niceties, of decorum, do you?”

“Etiquette is important, and I only pay heed to what’s important. Must be why you caught my attention,” he says slyly, grasping his hand for a squeeze then reaching over to plant a kiss at the corner of his mouth. It’s an invitation but also a rather-transparent distraction. Tony is not a fan of this line of questioning and would rather they occupy themselves with _other_ activities.

But Steve is unmoved. “I was ten.”

“Aye, and this... this thing between you and I?” Tony says, dropping the act, sincerity clear on his face. “Surprised me as much as you. I never thought… well...” he hesitates, his eyes flitting away, towards Steve’s hand in his, lightly pressing a fingernail into the meat of his palm. “It’s not important. What’s passed is past, and we be living in the now. So–” He tweaks his appearance, adding a couple fine lines and grey hairs interspersed in his goatee with just a few beginning to conquer the dark locks upon his crown. “What do you think? Be honest.”

Steve blinks. “You look good.” He’s not so young that people will wonder after his parents or how he had amassed a small fortune to buy the estate, but not so old that it looked like he is mere minutes from dropping dead.

“Excellent,” Tony replies, pleased as punch to have gotten the likeness right. “I'll be adding a few streaks of gray over time, and when you catch up, I’ll mirror the changes in your face over time, so no one’s the wiser.”

“Will you prove a flattering mirror, then?” Steve suspects Tony always had this goal in mind, and the entire exercise had been a farce to show off his powers.

Tony shrugs. “Isn’t it what you folks always be talking about in your tales, your happily ever afters. Someone to tie their lives to yours, to grow old and wither as you do?”

“Well, when you tell it that way...” _It comes across a wee bit selfish._

“It be the way of things far as I see,” Tony observes, his fingers combing Steve’s short hair behind his ear then circling around to rest on his cheek as he looks him in the eye. “I can offer you companionship the length of your lifespan, to stay by your side and grow old with you, and when you pass, I will pass back into the world of the sith, to remember our time together long as I live.”

“And how long will that be?” Steve persists.

_And why is Tony so reticient to give him a straight answer?_

“…You be getting the better end of the deal, Stevie. A long life be a curse more’n a blessing. You would know that if you’ve lived the breadth of mine.”

So Steve inquires yet again. “What are you truly?”

“I am your beloved, and I will love you to the end of mine days.”

* * *

Bucky requires help with harvesting his grain and transporting the lot of it to the laird’s mill to grind. Steve is about to leave for their home down the road when Pepper approaches, leading a black stallion up to his lands. She looks annoyed at the beast, though it walks steady beside her, seemingly not being obstinate nor difficult as far as Steve can tell.

“Good day to you Steve,” she calls out, bringing the horse to a halt with a short tug.

“And good day to you, miss,” he replies, eyeing the creature.

_It can’t be…_

“I must apologize, but I am on my way to a good friend’s to help with the harvest,” he continues. “I can stop by later if the laird be wanting my services. Perhaps more fish for his table?”

“Aye well, the laird heard of your toils and wishes to offer his services to ease the labor. He'll be granting you use of his horse for the bulk of the work,” she says, smiling even as her left eye twitches slightly. She holds out the silver bridle for Steve to take.

“That won’t be necessary,” Steve politely declines. The last thing he needs is Tony’s cursed stallion.

But Pepper insists, reaching over to wrap the strap around Steve’s palm so he is forced to take it. “He be a stupid horse but strong and can lift twice what another of his size could with little trouble.”

The horse snorts at that, stomping his front hoof, seemingly disgruntled at the assessment.

“Work the stupid beast to near death,” she adds brightly, her expression nearly vicious despite the smile plastered across her face. “It be encouraged by our laird.”

There’s nothing to be done about it, except–

“Thank you, Pepper, and convey my thanks to your employer if you please.”

“Oh, I’m certain he knows,” and with that, she’s off, heading back towards the castle without so much as a backward glance.

“She did not appear much fond of you, did she?” Steve tells the stallion. It huffs in agreement. “I'm not much fond of you, either, but here we stand.”

The beast hangs its head, the ears twitch back and forth, waiting for Steve’s command.

“Come along, then. Bucky be waiting for us.” Though it appears to be as tame as a lamb, he walks the horse down the road, refusing to ride it lest it buck him off without warning and break his neck like the cursed thing it is.

* * *

The harvest goes much faster, with more hands on deck as they cut the grains at the stalks with scythes and load them up into the horse cart. They have little need for the stallion at this juncture, but it may be useful in turning the millstones later to process the grains, give Bucky’s mare a break from the heavy, repetitive labor.

“That be a fine horse you have, Stevie,” Bucky had commented when he had first spied the stallion.

“Not mine,” Steve had clarified. “Our laird loaned him to me.”

Bucky cants his head to the side, giving him a queer look. “Our laird favors you, does he not?”

But Steve simply shrugs. “He favors the fish I catch.”

The cart is half full when the laird’s stallion startles and Steve rushes to calm him just as an arrow burrows itself in the bundle of grain behind where he had been standing. Steve rounds about to find four men on horseback – one men-at-arms and three yeoman – bearing down on the farm. He dives behind the cart alongside Bucky, who had already called out to Sheena to keep everyone inside. He grabs his scythe, passing another to Steve.

“Fuckin’ English son of a whore,” he mutters. “Do not let them get in.”

“Where the hell they come from?” Steve peeks over just as the black stallion charges like a devil out of hell. It zig-zags as arrows whistle by, and Steve swears the beast bends its shape, slipping past like dark water through a crack as it avoids projectiles to rush down the middle and then–

And then…

He drops back to the ground beside Bucky, breathing heavily, his face white as a sheet.

“What did you see?” Bucky inquires, wanting to peek over himself, but he is pulled down by Steve before he can crest the top of the cart’s side.

“The stallion tackled our assailants and be trampling the lot of them underfoot,” Steve tells him, eyes wild as they turn to his friend.

That’s not exactly accurate. What Steve had seen was impossible, but he swears the horse’s face had split at the jawline near to its ears, sawing off the arm of the men-at-(one)-arm in a single swipe, then whipping around at an impossible angle to smash into a yeoman, removing a chunk of shoulder, before taking the others out and trampling the lot of them for good measure.

When the screams have subsided, Bucky looks up, finding the bloody mass of twisted bodies left behind and the stallion trotting back, snorting and angry. “Good boy,” he says, taking a large step back from the wild beast because he is not stupid. “We best run, Stevie. More be coming soon.”

Steve starts to remove the bundles of grain, tossing them to the ground, while Bucky retrieves his family: Sheena and the new baby as well as their two children and her father, loading them up on the partially emptied cart while Steve hooks up the mare.

“You go up ahead to the castle while I head them off,” he says, grabbing the stallion’s bridle.

“You’re off your head! Come with us,” Bucky urges him.

“Get your family to safety,” Steve orders, leaving no room for argument. “Pepper be a reasonable woman and kind beside. She’ll let you in.”

With the stallion following after him, he jogs over to where the trampled soldiers lay fallen, trying not to look too hard at the gruesome injuries – the way they’re spilled open and broken, pieces missing, faces locked in a scream – as he scavenges a round red shield from one of the archers, all the weapons having been snapped and destroyed underfoot in the earlier attack.

“I hope I be right about you,” he mutters to the stallion, as he pushes the ever-present wine skin to the back and swings up onto its back, retreading their steps to follow after the horse cart driven by Bucky and covering the rear from further attack.

They are beset by additional invaders sporting the self-same red shield of England. Steve charges them, holding his shield up and trying not to notice how the horse below him seems to stretch and glide as it attacks, though it does not morph into whatever vision Steve had seen before, simply knocking off a rider to be trampled by his brethren as Steve knocks another off his horse with the edge of his shield delivered directly into the neck where the seam between leather armor and metal helmet lies.

Then his stallion swerves off into the treeline, leading the remaining two assailants away from Bucky and his family, towards the loch. Steve tries to direct him elsewhere, but the stallion resists any attempts to veer from its path, stopping just short on the banks of the loch to shy away from the water’s edge.

Steve tries to urge him to trot along the bank, to get a bit further from where they broke through the bush at least, dismounting to lead him if need be and muttering reassurances and curses alternately to the animal when the two riders are upon them, having caught up.

“Well, well… what do we have here, Rollins?” The shorter man asks, the two of them sliding off their mounts. The man removes his helmet, shaking out his hair which had gotten flattened under the cap. He’s got a high nose, chiseled jaw line, and shadow where his shorn beard is starting to grow in from several days of riding. He would be handsome, if he weren’t so English.

Steve sneers from the other side of his stallion, trying to calm it as he tightens his grip on the borrowed shield.

“Isn’t that one of ours, Rumlow?” Rollins asks, removing his helmet as well to reveal a dark haired man with the long hair of an English noblemen. “Where do you suppose he got it?”

“Pulled it from a pile of English dogs that be in the way,” Steve replies, stepping around the spooked stallion whinnying in distress to bring up the shield in front of them both. “Thought you be sneaking up on us like a bunch of right cowards, the lot of you. Catch us unawares to slaughter our women and wee babes.”

The one called Rumlow advances on Steve, forgoing his sword to draw his short dagger, something that would require him to get close and personal. “Why don’t we carve up this little bugger like a Christmas ham? There ain’t nothing like splitting open a Scotch pig, I tell you what.”

“He is a pretty one, isn’t he?” Rollins drawls, coming up behind him.

“Not for long.”

Steve braces himself for his last stand, when the stallion circles around Steve and refuses to move, obstinately facing the loch it refused to travel alongside.

“Move the horse,” Rollins orders, reaching out to stroke its snout as it snorts. “It’s a gorgeous mount, and what a fine bridle. Stolen, I presume, the horse and bridle both.”

But when Rumlow tries to pat its hind quarters to encourage the beast to move aside, he finds he cannot detach. “What the– I’m stuck!” he cries out, but Rollins has already discovered this for himself.

“What sorcery is this!”

Rumlow tries to stab the horse’s hide, but finds it impenetrable, glancing off like armor.

 _Tried to pet the kelpie upon its snout and got stuck, they say. Had to cut off his own hand to get away, but least he survived,_ his Nan had warned him many years ago.

“Tony!” Steve shouts, grasping onto the stallion’s neck and finding himself stuck as well, as the stallion takes off at a gallop into the loch, dragging three men along with it into the murky depths.

He hears the others screaming shortly before they go under, but Steve takes a deep breath just before the water takes him.

Everything is muffled under the surface: the other men’s gurgling screams, the haunting whinny of the kelpie and the frantic movement of bodies through water; it’s all ambient noise. Steve finds his wine skin and presses it to his mouth, finding he can breathe again like he had all those years ago. The flesh under his hand is solid and sealed fast to his own skin, but the feel is almost smooth and supple like a seal while the stallion’s mane, once soft and voluminous, becomes thick, scritchy, almost twine-like even in the water. He can only float, helpless as he watches the stallion spring gills from its neck, the flaps gently undulating in the water. Its mouth extends back, the snout growing in size but becoming gaunt, almost skeletal, as it opens to reveal row upon row of long, sharp teeth.

The creature aims for Rollins first, decapitating him with one swipe of its strong jaws, crunching the cranium between its teeth as if it were made of eggshells. Then, he guts Rumlaw with a sharp hoof, practically bisecting him across the midsection. The water blooms dark red around Steve, clouding his vision and inducing a panic, sharp and bright in his stomach, skittering up his spine and making its home in his hindbrain. Steve is prey caught in a kelpie’s trap, and though the creature is not unknown to Steve, in the moment fear overtakes him, loosens his grip on the wine skin, allowing it to float up. He can’t breathe. Everything is suffocation and red death, and from the midst of it all emerges a facsimile of Tony’s face, elongated and dark and horrible but unmistakenly him. He presses his thinned lips to Steve’s, passing fetid air tainted with the coppery tang of his victim’s blood.

Trapped with the beast and unable to escape, Steve blacks out.

* * *

He wakes upon the shore, his mind foggy, throat pained, and head throbbing but inexplicably alive. He turns his head and startles, scuttling back several feet from a gruesome pile of slimy dark red entrails washed upon the shore, the only remains of Tony’s most recent victims. His gaze flicks back to the water, where he spies Tony, his hair plastered flat to his forehead with only his eyes just skimming above the surface of the loch, watching him with a guarded expression, awaiting his verdict.

It’s a familiar scene, something Steve had convinced himself was a fever dream, a result of near-drowning, but it had been real, hadn’t it? All of it.

Steve knew what Tony was, what he is capable of, had known for a while if he’s being honest with himself, but it’s another thing entirely to see it in action. He can’t turn away, stuff his ears against the truth now. And truth be told, he didn’t want to. If he had any sense at all, he would be terrified. He would run like he did all those years ago…

Then again, Steve has never been one for self-preservation.

“My Nan always said kelpies are liars by nature,” he calls out to Tony, rising to his feet.

Tony inches closer, his chest emerging from the stream, pink-tinged water sluicing down from his too-wide mouth split halfway to his ears to show off large, razor-sharp teeth glinting in the sun.

“She did, did she? Your Nan’s a smart woman.”

“But you haven’t lied to me, have you then?”

Tony is silent at that, his expression unreadable and large dark eyes watching Steve.

“…Why haven’t you eaten me? The good Lord knows you’ve had opportunities a-plenty over the years.” Perhaps Steve had been too pitifully thin as a child to make much of a meal for the creature, despite efforts to fatten him up. And now? Now, he had grown large and broad, a good meal for one such as Tony, and yet, the kelpie had hesitated and hesitates still.

“Aye, well, humans are greedy. They covet. They always be wanting. They see a young man down on his luck wearing a necklace of worth or a horse with a silver bridle, and they don’t even question, do they? They try to take what’s not theirs. The lure wouldn’t work half so well if you lot weren’t so avaricious in your appetites,” Tony explains nonchalantly, even as dread grows in Steve’s belly at how open he is about his appetites and methods, almost clinical in his analysis. “But not you, Stevie. You were a skinny babe with nothing to your name, and yet you shared what little you had with a stranger you thought down on his luck, robbed and dumped in the river as it were. I will not lie to you; I considered it – thought about it more’n once, truth told – but… You were interesting at first, an anomaly. And now? Now I’ve grown… fond of you, and I would not see you come to harm if I can help it.”

Steve rubs his arms against a shiver, though whether it is a response to the frigid wet or Tony’s admission is uncertain. “Fond of me, are you?” he asks.

“Aye.”

“You told me you loved me.”

“Aye,” Tony confirms. He steps forward towards the banks, allowing his glamour to slip even further, his face grown oblong and dark, split unnaturally at the cheeks. Steve had seen him tear out a man’s throat with those teeth, strip the flesh from his bones, and swallow hungrily. Truth be told, it made him ill to remember.

And Tony knows it.

“Can you love me, Stevie, now that you seen me for what I am?”

Steve doesn’t say anything. Instead, he takes a step forward, the water rushing over his feet to his ankles, and then another step and still another yet. Tony watches Steve draw near, his arms open and expression trusting, as he ventures unwaveringly towards an unknown fate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was the original end of the fic: ambiguous and slightly frustrating. I will be adding an epilogue where Steve's brother comes home after receiving the letter and money Tony sent on Steve's behalf. It's finished. I'm just going to edit it a little and upload later today.


	4. The Prodigal Son Returns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s brother, Douglass, returns to find a strange occupant on his family’s lands. The man insists he enter their abode where his brother awaits their long-anticipated reunion, but there’s something about the dark stranger that sets Douglass’s teeth on edge.

**Two Months Later**

Douglass leaps off the back of the horse-drawn cart, carrying a bindle containing all his worldly possessions of the past eight-odd years, having used the coin his brother had sent to pay off the rest of his servitude under the Dunaidhs. He thanks the man who allowed him to ride the lions’ share of the way and sets out for home, walking along well-worn wheel tracks towards his family’s homestead.

It had saddened him to hear of his Nan’s and mother’s untimely death several years before from Stevie’s post, but his brother must have been doing well enough to send for him. Besides, wee Stevie seemingly required his help (if not his company) to tend the family farm, and so when Douglass approaches his childhood residence, he is perplexed to find a man he had never seen before relaxing on a stump outside the door, idly watching over a small herd of sheep. The man watches him from across the yard with dark eyes, cocking his head to the side in curiosity.

“Good day to you, sir,” Douglass calls out as he approaches. “You have a fine flock of sheep, I see.”

“Can I be helping you at all, stranger?” the man asks, eyeing Douglass warily, as if he be the trespasser and not the trespassed upon.

“I’m looking for my brother, Stiobhan. We grew up here, and he gave word for my swift return.”

And now the stranger’s icy demeanor melts, giving way to friendliness. “Ah… you must be Stevie’s brother,” he says, standing then overextending his back into a stretch before straightening once again. “I do spot the likeness now that I know there be one to find. Your brother is inside. Go on, now.” He motions for Douglass to enter the home first while he means to follow after.

Douglass doesn’t move closer, finding the stranger’s mode of expression a touch odd, perhaps even a little too eager. It makes the hair stand on the back of his neck.

The stranger urges him forward, “It’s been a long while, hasn’t it? I’m sure he be waiting for you on pins and needles, he is.”

“Did my brother hire you?” Douglass asks instead, trying to figure out what it is about the man that puts him so ill at ease. The man is not so large as himself nor so obviously threatening, and yet, something deep in his soul – call it instinct or what have you – is screaming at him that this stranger is a predator. The sheep shy away from the duo and bleat loud and shrill in the background, preying on the young man’s frayed nerves, giving him a fright.

“No, lad. Nothing of the sort, but… Well, I’ll have him explain. Inside. He’s been waiting for you all this time. You best be going in,” the dark man insists, making way. “After you.”

Without thinking, Douglass takes a small step back.

“Tony, what’s all the commotion out here? The sheep be screaming a storm. Bucky and Sheena’s brood chasing them then?” a voice calls from inside the house seconds before a broad man wearing his brother’s face steps through the threshold. He stops, staring at the newcomer. “Duggie?”

“…Stevie? Is that you?” he says, sidestepping Tony to hurry towards his brother, embracing him in relief. Wee Stevie now stands even with him in height and breadth, his stature having caught up while they have been apart. He pats his upper arms on either side. “You grew, you did.”

“Aye, and so did you.” Steve smiles as he brings his brother in for another hug before finally letting him go to introduce the stranger. “And this be our new laird, bought the land a few years back after Ma passed,” he says, stepping to the side to include the aforementioned laird in the conversation. “Tony, this be my brother, Douglass, but I always call him Duggie.”

“Glad to meet you, sir,” Douglass says, tipping his head, but the name tickles his memory. “Tony… That be the name of the imaginary friend you used to have when you were a lad, was it?”

“Not imaginary, I’m afraid. I used to travel by here with regular frequency and met Stevie as he fished from time to time, though I hear tell he may have embellished some of the details,” Tony explains. “When the land went up for sale, I purchased it outright, and now, young Stevie here be the finest fishmonger in the county, employed over on my estate full-time, but he requested that he be allowed to fix up your family’s plot, he did. Said his brother was coming home and didn’t want it to be out-of-sorts. The land is yours now, to farm and graze or what have you. I can send farmhands if you be needing the help.”

Douglass doesn’t know what to say, except: “Thank you, sir.”

“Now let’s be going in, shall we?” he suggests. “I’m sure Stevie wants to give you the grand tour.”

* * *

When Steve and Tony return back to the castle later that night, Steve travels the secret passage connecting his quarters to Tony’s, sliding open a hidden passageway through the wardrobe. They lie in bed together, whispering to each other in the dark.

“Must you do what you did to Duggie?” Steve asks him.

But Tony feigns ignorance. “I haven’t the faintest idea of that which you speak.”

“You scared him on purpose,” he clarifies flatly, his tone brooking no argument.

Tony is silent, then: “Your brother was a bully – don’t you deny it – and like most bullies, he be a coward yet.”

_That can’t be the reason._

“Tony…”

Steve can practically hear Tony roll his eyes as he states, almost petulantly, “Alright, alright… when I used to visit while you were away, he’d brush my hair the wrong direction,” he admits, feeling Steve’s chest rumble with suppressed laughter.

“I looked ridiculous enough humoring a human child on my back without any intention to take so much as the tiniest nibble–” Tony pinches his fingers together to indicate the limitations of his proposed cannibalism, “–and then he had to repay my overwhelming kindness and forbearance by brushing against the grain to fluff up my hair, the wee brat, forcing me to suffer further indignity.”

Steve coughs to quiet the guffaw rising in his chest. “What a monster,” he says flatly in faux sympathy. “I can see why you saw fit to scare him in such a way.”

“He was a menace. It be intolerable, nigh insufferable really. The humiliation of it all.”

Steve sighs. “…Please don’t eat my brother.”

That inspires a chuckle from Tony, who wraps his arms around Steve, reaching over to press a kiss against his temple. “Aye, well, anything for you, beloved.”

Steve nestles into his embrace. “Love you, sweetheart.”

“He’d probably be all stringy now, by the by. Adults simply do not have the same marbling.”

Steve bats his arm. “Tony!”

“…And it would make you sad, a tragedy I cannot bare to abide by.” Tony gently caresses Steve’s face. “I love you, too, Stevie. Forever and always.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn’t the first story I’ve written where I’ve taken the characters so completely out of their native canon habitats, but it is the first one I’m posting. If you’re interested in these types of stories I am currently writing an Ancient Greece AU tentatively called “Bull-Headed” based on Theseus and the Minotaur (which was the original fill for this square, but it got too long) that should start posting in April 2020.


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